Returning to the prairie

April 05, 2014|By Cindy Dampier

You stand for a minute at the edge of John Mariani's prairie garden in late summer, pondering entry into a shifting wall of stalks and stems. The plants, shoulder height and bristling with hairs and leaves and the occasional thorn, do not beckon. Yet you plunge in, staggering, finding your footing in places you can't quite see, until you are immersed.

The first bug crawls up your forearm, and you flinch, but then more follow, and your twitchier instincts begin to quiet. You find the will to stand still, and details, otherworldly and beautiful, emerge.

The prairie teems, in a way that makes you understand that word as never before. It impresses you as viscerally, almost viciously alive, single-mindedly flowering and seeding and crowding and pushing as though you aren't even there. The prairie continues undeterred, unchecked and essentially uninterested in you. You sense this, and smile.

If you were thinking prairie gardening was all about waving fields of grasses or miserable-looking weed patches, you'd be wrong.

And if you imagined John Mariani, master of the North Shore's manicured estate gardens, spends his weekends gazing over a clipped hedge sipping lemonade, you'd be wrong twice.

Most weekends you can find Mariani in rural Wisconsin, in his prairie garden, looking the way that gardeners do: Eyes cast toward the ground as he walks the paths he has carefully mowed around the property, an ever-present weeding tool in one hand.

"There's one," he mutters, stabbing the business end of his favorite weeder at an interloping weed underfoot. He stabs at it efficiently, gives a small satisfied grunt and hoists it up, a small victory.

The property, a broad prairie ringed by hilly, wooded savanna, is 60 acres in all: No house. No hedges. No lawns like putting greens. Just Mariani's garden, still a work in progress. And, yes, he's weeding it by hand.

"I must be crazy doing this," he says with a chuckle. "But I really believe eventually I can control it, and I think I can do it myself."

He's been trying for 10 years.

When Mariani first saw the property, it was in the process of a different transformation. "The person I bought it from was subdividing it," he says. The gravel drive, aspiring to a planned community aesthetic, was lined with a row of spindly ash trees. But the expanse of rolling plain and the bucolic Wisconsin view that unfolded from the top of the highest hill spoke to him. He planned a weekend retreat, including a house on the top of that hill to take in the view. But it was the landscape that lit his imagination. "I knew I could do something with this place," he says. So he sold his home in Lake Forest and opted to rent, rolling the money from the sale of the house into the Wisconsin property.

Drawn to the idea of a naturalistic landscape, Mariani wasn't quite sure how to start.

His formidable career as a landscape architect at his family's highly regarded firm, Mariani Landscape, was centered on the classic garden forms that grace major estates. "At the time," he says, "I didn't really understand savanna or natural prairie or any of that. I did notice there were some plants I'd never seen before. I realized that these were prairie and savanna remnant plants. I got hooked, and it just went from there."

The work turned out to be more than he bargained for. "You create a prairie by subtraction," he says. Stripping away invasive and non-native plants, as well as man-made distractions -- including 3 miles of barbed wire and steel posts, by his count -- Mariani uncovered hoped-for signs of the prairie. Long-dormant under a layer of invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle, that he cleared along an old fence line, bottlebrush and big bluestem grasses emerged and started growing again. "It's like finding buried treasure," Mariani says. "The first time I saw big bluestem growing wild was on my property. That's the tallgrass grass. I knew we had something here."

Controlled burning and herbicides, necessary to help tamp down tough invasive plants, made more room for natives to return and created fertile ground for seeding. Mariani handpicked native plants for the seed mixture, and slowly the delicately layered world of the prairie returned.

Wildlife traffic increased too. Mariani spotted a rough-legged hawk, wintering from its home on the tundra, along with deer, coyotes and endless butterflies. "I tried to get as much diversity as I could here," Mariani says, "and with diversity you get more creatures. I've found several kinds of snakes, frogs. ... Whippoorwills, which I hadn't heard since I was a child, come every evening."